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eISSN 2394-6075 | Vol 5, No 3, CLRI August 2018 | p. 54-64
The Role of Guilt in Ian McEwan’s Atonement
Jayantika Chakraborty
Third year, Psychology Honours, Loreto College, Kolkata.
Abstract
The term “atonement” connotes the action of making
amends for a wrong or sin. In Christian theology, it refers
to the reconciliation of God and mankind through Jesus
Christ. The movie Atonement is one of cumulative power,
reflecting on the unfinished, unmoored mind of a
vulnerable young woman, Briony Tallis, who is seemingly
trapped by unimaginable guilt in a life of suspended
animation. The denouement of the film siphons off with
Briony atoning for her guilt that has, since her
adolescence, tainted her life with treacherous effects. Her
atonement comes off as a corrosively elegiac way of
reconciling with the past, and is filmed beautifully, with
pyrotechnic complexity, displaying adequately the
scalding moral vision of war as a backdrop. With a
luminous juxtaposition of the stream of consciousness
mode of narration and multiple voices, montage and
flashbacks, Joe Wright unilaterally weaves a tale of selfdiscovery and the retelling of a story that centers around
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The Role of Guilt in Ian McEwan’s Atonement
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Jayantika
guilt. Guilt, therefore, features as an inalienable poetry of
experience in the film, coming off almost as apparent,
real, and firm to the touch. In an interdisciplinary
approach of psychological study of artistic work, this
project illustrates the dynamics of guilt and atoning for it
after over half a lifetime to reach psychological
transcendence and attain a cohesiveness of the
fragmented concept of “self”.
Keywords
Ian McEwan, Joe Wright, Briony Tallis, Atonement, Guilt
The Role of Guilt in Ian McEwan’s Atonement
The movie Atonement is an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s
novel of the same name, directed by British filmmaker Joe
Wright. With a running time of 123 minutes, it stars Keira
Knightley, James McAvoy, Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai,
Vanessa Redgrave, Benedict Cumberbatch, Juno Temple
and Brenda Bethyn.
Guilt is a cognitive or emotional experience that occurs
when one realizes or believes accurately that they have
compromised on their standards of conduct or have
violated a moral standard, and that they bear a significant
responsibility for that violation. From the morphological
point of view, the word “guilty” means “having done
something illegal or being responsible for doing
something wrong or for something bad that has
happened.” According to Sigmund Freud, feelings of guilt
may arise when an individual violates the ideals or values
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The Role of Guilt in Ian McEwan’s Atonement
Chakraborty
Jayantika
of the “superego” by responding to the impulses from the
“id”. (Freud, 1922)
In the film, Briony Tallis is a thirteen year old perched on
the brink of adolescence. Gifted and precocious, she
writes and directs dramatic plays as a childhood pastime
in her father’s country manor during the mid-1930s.
Briony is infatuated with Robbie Turner, a servant’s son,
whose education at Oxford is funded by Briony’s father,
and who wishes to become a medical doctor. Briony tests
whether Robbie loves her by leaping into a pond. He saves
her, but is infuriated by her stunt and her schoolgirl crush.
When Robbie asks her to hand-deliver a sealed note,
containing romantic proposition, to her older sister, Cecilia
Tallis, Briony, feeling spurned on having sufficiently
gauged the preexisting romance between Cecilia and
Robbie, opens and reads the message. This incident paves
off as a massive misinterpretation of Cecilia and Robbie’s
love to Briony, and seals Briony’s suspicions of Robbie as
being sick with brazen lust. Later that night, Briony’s
psychological integrity is further disquieted by witnessing
her sister and Robbie engaged intimately in the library.
Post this incident, when Briony briefly witnesses the
physical violation of her cousin, Lola, she knows and
names the culprit without hesitance. Briony’s testimony
wrongfully sends Robbie to prison where, after four years,
he procures early release only if he goes to fight the Nazis
in France. Both Briony and Cecilia become nurses in the
war effort, but remain estranged. Briony never has the
courage to retract her sworn testimony. Eventually, Briony
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The Role of Guilt in Ian McEwan’s Atonement
Chakraborty
Jayantika
is seen visiting her sister’s apartment in London and finds
Robbie staying there. She asks for forgiveness and though
furious, Robbie and Cecilia tell her how to set the record
straight. Before this can happen, however, a flash-forward
reveals Briony as a celebrated novelist on the cusp of
death. In a media interview preceding the release of her
“twenty-first and final novel”, she explains that Robbie
and Cecilia were both killed during the war, and that the
reconciliation between them never took place. Thus,
Briony could never actually make amends for her once
taken hasty decision that perhaps now is taking a toll on
her life. Unable to reconcile the lovers in real life, Briony
takes up her novel as a sluice for proffering Robbie and
Cecilia the happy ending they deserved. As an
embodiment of her elemental conflict between life and
guilt, Briony names her novel “Atonement”. Executing
revenge for not getting the love we think we deserve from
others has thus been disguised as “atonement”. Through
her atonement, Briony reconciles as much with her own
true self, as she literally unites the two lovers.
In this study, the aim is to trace the extent of Briony’s guilt, and how it
leads to her expiation and reconciliation with her self.
Research Objectives
To analyze the role of guilt and its atonement in order to reach
psychological integrity and transcendence, in the movie “Atonement”.
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The Role of Guilt in Ian McEwan’s Atonement
Chakraborty
Jayantika
Research Method
In conducting the study, the descriptive qualitative
method has been employed along with library research.
Analysis
Atonement is influenced by what Genettes (1972) calls
variable
internal
focalization,
homodiegetic
and
heterodiegetic narrator in the movie, with the former
referring to the presentation of an event from a different
point of view, the latter related to the identity of the
narrative voice. (Hidalgo, 2005) The movie is primarily
depicted from Briony’s point of view, changing with the
development of the story, and with her successive
progression through the stage of teenage vulnerability to
maturational understanding of human relations. Hence, at
each point in time, Briony’s identity creates an
atmosphere of uncertainty and elusiveness, enhancing the
sense of ambiguity, and intensifying the undertone of guilt
in the narrative. It is not surprising to notice that the
whole story turns out to be based on old Briony’s
memory, which can scarcely be called reliable since she’s a
prey to the degenerative disease- vascular dementia.
Thus, by abandoning the traditional third person point of
view, Wright, deftly captures on celluloid the post-modern
self conscious narrator, making the viewer question the
narrative, and the relationship between fiction and real
life. (Han and Wang, 2015)
Modern psychology draws a very fine line between guilt
and atonement. Although guilt, traditionally has a
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Chakraborty
Jayantika
negative connotation in Jewish, Catholic and Puritanical
faiths, psychologists keep finding evidence of its
usefulness. Alan Carr views atonement as a positive
process. (Carr, 2011) To him, forgiveness and atonement
are ways of repairing relationships that have been
damaged by transgressions. Briony Tallis devotes her
entire life repenting a crime she committed while still a
young girl. Consumed by detrimental sentiments, Briony is
outweighed with the burden of atonement for life, despite
all her longings for serene happiness. The film expands on
the destitution of happiness in Briony’s family, work, and
life. It dwells on the fabrication of happiness in terms of
Briony’s obsession with self-perfection, social recognition
and manipulative power. It elaborates on the extinction of
happiness issued from the incessant torment of a guilty
conscience and further approaches the possibility of
achieving innermost salvation and spiritual happiness via
resignation. Briony, after coming to realization of what her
false testimony amounted to, devotes her entire life trying
to make reparations for it to redeem herself. Her
relinquishing of an education at Cambridge and joining of
the nursing services to help injured soldiers; her leaving
behind of her family, and her writing of the novel as her
final act of atonement- everything revolves around
Briony’s hedonistic search for inner peace and salvation.
Her novel “Atonement” thus comes off an a “final act of
kindness” for Robbie and Cecilia. With saying that “[i]t’s
not impossible to imagine Robbie and Cecilia, still alive,
still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at the
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Chakraborty
Jayantika
Trials of Arabella”, Briony gives a fictional happy ending to
the estranged lovers. The novel becomes the symbol of
atonement for her sins.
This very metaphorical reparation of hers as a veritable
extension of self-mediated punishment, can be explained
in light of a few psychological theories, which expound
guilt as a private, intra-psychic, rather than an interpsychic phenomenon. In the book Self-Consciousness and
Social Anxiety (1980) Arnold H. Buss writes that guilt is
connected to the private self-reflection, which does not
necessarily include other persons, or their perspectives.
“Guilt is essentially private. The best test of guilt is
whether anyone else knows of the transgression” (p.159).
The fact that no one has to know about one’s guilt,
confirms its intra-psychic nature. Hence, the fact that
Briony chooses to cage in her guilt and suffering in her
own little box of solitude, through six decades of her life,
corroborates with Buss’ perspective on guilt. A
behavioristic perspective is maintained by D.L.Mosher in
his article ‘Interaction of fear and guilt in inhibiting
unacceptable behavior’ from 1965. He writes that “guilt may
be defined as generalized or expectancy for self-mediated
punishment for violating, or anticipating the violation of,
or failure to attain internalized standards of proper
behavior” (p.162). His reference to a self-mediated
punishment makes it clear that the focus for guilt is not
from other persons, but something negative that one
does to oneself. Guilt, in a behavioristic perspective, is
thus, an anticipation of self-injury, and a solely intraContemporary Literary Review India | eISSN 2394-6075 | Vol 5, No 3,
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The Role of Guilt in Ian McEwan’s Atonement
Chakraborty
Jayantika
personal phenomenom, as is the force majeure in Briony’s
life. In the book Social Evolution (1985), Robert L.Trivers
writes from an “evolutionistic perspective” that human
guilt and shame comes from a natural selection because
these emotions prevent humans from carrying out actions
that could harm their relations to others. This is because
such relations are important for their survival. Briony’s
actions gave a hefty weight to her conscience of moral
imperatives. Guilt, in this context, stands out as a prime
example of the moralizing role of emotions. The act of
dedicating her final most book to Robbie and Cecilia thus
transforms into a strongly meaningful deed for Briony, as
she is bathed in the emotional release of guilt from her
trove of moral imperatives, half a lifetime ago.
In Christian theology, the word “atonement” is described
as the reconciliation of man with God, through Christ’s
sacrificial death. (Oxford University Press,2005) A
rephrasing of the basic question leads to Briony’s tussle
with her morality: “How can I be rewarded my forgiveness
if I am the one who gets to decide what happens?”. In
other words, Briony is aware that one cannot self-ascribe
atonement. One can only seek it, but it can be granted by
the only ones who have been have been wronged. Being
an author of the story places Briony in the apex because
of her absolute power to decide outcomes. Her position
on the pedestal makes her question if she is not “also
God” to the characters in her book. She is. She recognizes
her power but concludes that there can be “no atonement
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Chakraborty
Jayantika
for God or novelists” and that only the attempt matters.
(Nelson, 2013)
Conclusion
Based on the analysis, two broad conclusions can be
drawn upon. The first conclusion concerns the extent of
Briony’s guilt spanning six decades culminating in her
emotional turbidity, and the second pertains to Briony’s
atonement of her guilt, through her fictional penmanship.
Briony’s guilt leads her to practice a life of simplicity and
penance, subsuming all her emotions for her entire life.
The very motif of her life centers around seeking of ways
to expiate her wrongdoing. She seeks social justification
and leaves behind a life of prosperity to nurse wounded
soldiers. At each stage in life, spanning over six decades,
Briony is seen engaged in venting out her accumulated
emotional turmoil. As a novelist, she delivers herself from
her jargon of culpability and self- reproach by
fictionalizing a happy ending for Robbie and Cecilia. The
fiction thus becomes as much an act of atonement for
Briony, as it becomes a tribute to love-an emotion that
Briony kept swaddled in secrecy her entire life.
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Jayantika
Works Cited
1. McEwan, Ian. (2001). Atonement. New York : A division of Random
House, Inc.
2. Atonement. (2007) Dir. Joe Wright. Screenplay by Christopher
Hampton. Perf. James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Romola Garai,
Saoirse Ronan, and Vanessa Redgrave. Focus Features. [DVD 2008]
3. Genette, Gerard (1972). Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method.
Oxford: Blackwell.
4. Freud, Sigmund (1922). A General Introduction To Psychoanalysis.
New York: Boni and Liveright.
5. Hidalgo, Pilar (2005). “Memory and Storytelling in Ian McEwan’s
Atonement”. In: Critique 46.2, Pp 82-91.
6. Han, J. and Wang, P. (2015) The experimental techniques in Ian
McEwan’s Atonement. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 3, 163-166.
7. Buss, Arnold H., (1980). Self-Consciousness and Social Anxiety. W.H.
Freeman & Co Ltd.
8. Mosher, D.L., (1965). Interaction of fear and guilt in inhibiting
unacceptable behavior, in Journal of Consulting Psychology, 29: 161167.
9. Trivers, Robert L., (1985). Social Evolution. Benjamin-Cummings
Pub Co.
10. Carr, A. (2011). Positive Psychology: The Science of Happiness and
Human Strengths. London: Routledge. Pp 285.
11. Cross, F.L., ed. “Atonement.” The Oxford Dictionary of the
Christian Church, New York: Oxford University Press. 2005
12. Nelson, M. (2013). “The interplay of Authorial Control and Readerly
Judgem
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Chakraborty
Jayantika
Jayantika Chakraborty is a Third Year student of Psychology
Honours, Loreto College, Kolkata.
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